In some conventional video processing systems, video data such as movies are vulnerable to piracy and require protection against illegal copying. The loss associated with piracy and unauthorized copying is greatest in high value movies and video programs. Since uncompressed digital video in clear form can be used to create perfect copies of the high value programs in particular, it is necessary to enable the protection of uncompressed video with copy protection technology. To protect against piracy or unauthorized copying, video data such as high value video content is sometimes compressed and encrypted before it can be accessed in memory and storage devices. Video decoding and de-compression systems generally utilize frame buffers for motion prediction, which may provide enhanced picture quality. Video images or pictures stored in these frame buffers are un-compressed and clear. Accordingly, attackers or hackers may utilize various schemes to access these buffers and copy the video images.
Scramblers may be utilized to scramble uncompressed data to guard against unwanted intrusion by attackers or hackers. There may be several issues related to implementing scramblers for protecting video frame buffers. For example, scramblers may require a very high throughput. A resolution of 1920×1080 8-bit pixels and 30 frame/second with 4:2:0 chroma format video would require at least 746.496 Mbps and may be as high as 2.3 Gbps, for example. This may be very expensive to implement. If the scrambler is included in a DRAM controller, the initial latency of the DRAM controller may increase. This increase in initial latency may impact critical instantaneous bandwidth. If a block cipher is utilized directly, the block scrambling may increase the size of memory fetches needed to perform motion compensation (MC).
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.